


Uber Driver AU

by theappleppielifestyle



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-05
Updated: 2017-10-05
Packaged: 2019-01-09 05:04:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12269463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theappleppielifestyle/pseuds/theappleppielifestyle
Summary: “Where to?”The man rattles off an address- high end for the neighbourhood they’re in now, not to mention the scruffy hoodie and sweatpants the guy is wearing. Then the guy leans forwards so he’s nearly off the seat and says, “Okay, honestly, I’m about thirty seconds from passing out so I’m going to need you to start talking. About anything. Your dog, your job, your first memory of your dead Aunty Bessie, I don’t care, just talk to me, go.”(Or: Steve drives for Uber. Tony is a customer with a poor rating.)





	Uber Driver AU

Steve is well on the way to taking his sixth disjointed power nap of the day when his phone lights up.

There’s a moment when Steve swears into his pillow and heartily considers pretending he didn’t notice this. It’s something he considers yet again when he picks up his phone, taps the Uber app and sees the rating of the person who wants to get driven somewhere.

It’s a 3. Steve has heard the rule that if they’re a three or less, it might not be worth driving them anywhere, since they might vomit in your car or  rob you or jerk off in the backseat.

But Steve, as always, has his bank balance blinking in neon lights in his mind, and if he picks this person up then he might be able to afford low-rate chicken this week.

Sighing, he taps ‘OK’ into the app and pushes himself up from the bed he just collapsed into five minutes previously.

 

 

 

 

 

 

One thing he likes about the dishwashing job he has in the daytime is he doesn’t have to plaster on his customer-service face. It’s still an effort to shoot his passenger a smile as he gets in- Steve is channeling most of his energy into driving and staying awake, so he doesn’t have much left to spare to seem chipper.

“Where to?”

The man rattles off an address- high end for the neighbourhood they’re in now, not to mention the scruffy hoodie and sweatpants the guy is wearing. Then the guy leans forwards so he’s nearly off the seat and says, “Okay, honestly, I’m about thirty seconds from passing out so I’m going to need you to start talking. About anything. Your dog, your job, your first memory of your dead Aunty Bessie, I don’t care, just talk to me, go.”

Steve blinks as he pulls away from the curb. He darts a glance into the rear-view mirror. “Sir, are you drunk?”

“Not right now,” comes the immediate reply. The man is tapping his fingers on his knees, fast enough it’s almost a blur. “If you talk all the way to the building, I’ll tip. We’re tipping Uber drivers now, right? I don’t care, I’m tipping either way. Big tip. Well, as big as I can make it without starving. Go go go.”

“Uh.” Steve wets his lips. He had been about to say  _I’m exhausted, too, how’s about I just drive you there without falling asleep at the_   _wheel_ , but the mention of tipping gives him pause. “Just talk about anything?”

The man nods rapidly.

“Do you want this to be a conversation, or do I just talk at you?”

“Either. I don’t care. Come on.”

“Okay.” Steve tries to think of a topic suitable to tell a literal stranger about before deciding he can’t be bothered and he’ll never see this guy again anyway. “I’m working so much lately that I’m reduced to having my friends come and see me during my breaks. Last week I was so tired I slept in a storeroom while my coworker stood watch. I dream about washing dishes now, since I’m doing it so much when I’m awake. I hate it, I thought I could at least get away from it while I’m unconscious, but apparently not.”

He’s prepared to just go on talking, but the guy talks over him with, “You work as a dishwasher?”

“Kitchenhand,” Steve corrects him. “But mostly I wash the dishes, yeah. The cook gets angry when I do things wrong. Hard to mess up doing the dishes. What do you do?”

“I’m a technical security consultant.”

“Sounds fancy.”

“Mm.” Tony sounds just as unenthused about it as Steve does about his dishwasher job. “Basically, big companies hire me to fix and code their information so it doesn’t get robbed. I could fix them remotely, but  _no_ , their information is delicate so I have to come in every second goddamn night of the week at 1 in the morning because some idiot pressed something he shouldn’t and ended the world as we know it.”

Steve waits for him to continue. When he doesn’t, he glances in the rear-view mirror. The guy looks just as worn out as Steve, and he’s slumping vaguely to the side.

Steve clears his throat. “You want me to keep talking?”

The guy straightens up again. “What? Yeah.” He blinks hard, and Steve catches a glimpse of dark brown.

“Okay,” Steve says, and at a loss of what else to say, he proceeds to drag up every bit he can remember about this week, down to the tiniest boring detail. His passenger seems to appreciate it, though- he nods occasionally and comments on something when they’re stopped at a red light.

When they reach his destination, the man claps Steve once on the shoulder and shells two twenties out of his pocket. “These are your tip. I’d give you more, but I need to eat. You get it. Anyway, more’s coming your way if you wait here for about 15 minutes. Hopefully it shouldn’t take longer.”

Steve nods. “Sure,” he says, shuffling his bank balance around to suit the new influx of money. “I’ll be here.”

“Great. Take a nap while I’m in there or something, you look like shit.”

“Hey, back at you.”

“Rude,” the man says, but he gives Steve a tired, slightly surprised grin before heading inside the building.

Steve tilts his head back against his seat and closes his eyes. He isn’t really going to nap, but he’s comfortable falling into that hazy not-quite-asleep space until the man gets back.

As he waits, he wonders why the man has such a low rating on the Uber app. Even if he pulls this whole ‘talk to me’ shtick on every drive, surely the drivers can’t be pissed off enough to rate him that low. It’s off-putting, sure, but Steve had even begun to enjoy it during the last ten minutes of the ride.

It doesn’t hurt that the man’s good looking, either. Steve hadn’t noticed until he stepped onto the sidewalk and the light of the streetlamps hit him, but he has an oddly movie-star look that doesn’t fit with the hoodie and sweatpants. Not to mention the way the guy holds himself: Steve can’t identify it, but he knows it doesn’t suit a techie.

And those eyes- Steve hasn’t had time to draw in months, but his fingers itch for a sketchpad when he thinks back to the man’s eyes reflecting the light of the streetlamps.

When there’s a knock on the window, Steve forces his eyes open.

“Wow, I wasn’t serious about you taking a nap.”

“I’m awake.” Steve digs the heels of his hands against his eyes. “I was awake. Just resting. I’m good to drive you home.”

“That was my next question,” the guy says, and climbs into the front seat next time. “Okay if I sit here?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure.” Steve focuses on the street he’s about to pull out into. “Still need me to talk?”

The man sighs, long and loud and exhausted to his bones. He slumps back into his seat. “I’m hoping to actually get some sleep when I get back to my place-”

“Okay-”

“-but you intrigued me with that story about chasing after the garbage truck your friend passed out in. I assume he wasn’t smooshed in a trash compactor?”

It drags a laugh out of Steve as he remembers Bucky’s incredulous face as he poked his head out of the top of the moving garbage truck after Steve had been tailing it for eight blocks. “God, nearly. It’s funny now, but it was a close call.”

“Do tell.”

And Steve does. He’s on the tail end of it when he pulls up to the curb in front of the guy’s place, and Steve pauses to ask, “Sorry, do you want-”

But the guy waves for him to continue, and they sit in Steve’s shitty little van for several minutes as the story winds to an end.

The man’s shaking with laughter by the end of it, which Steve expects is more sleep deprivation than genuine amusement. His eyes are creasing in a way Steve suspects is premature, if it’s the start of crow lines.

Steve doesn’t know why he says it: “You’re different than I expected.”

The man’s laugh trails off in the middle as he shoots Steve a puzzled look that borders on suspicious, and Steve backtracks: “Your Uber rating- it’s a lot lower than I’d expect.”

The man’s expression clears. “Oh! Yeah, uh.” He coughs into his fist. “Yeah, people don’t tend to appreciate my constant talking. When they don’t want to talk, I have to keep myself awake somehow.”

 _I thought it was oddly charming._ This time Steve keeps it behind his teeth.

“Also I’ve been unpleasantly drunk in more than one Uber,” the man continues.

Steve taps his phone, which sits in his pocket. “Well, I’ll be sure to give you a rating that will put your average up.”

“Huh. That’s appreciated,” the man says, though he has Steve pinned with another strange look. “So, do I get to know the name of my friendly neighbourhood Uber driver?”

Steve tries to remember if there’s a guideline against this, but he supposes that taxi drivers have their names displayed openly, so- “Steve.”

“Steve,” the man repeats, like he’s tasting something for the first time and isn’t sure if he wants a second helping. He holds out a hand. “I’m Tony. Nice to meet you. Wish it was under less exhausted circumstances.”

“You and me both,” Steve says, taking Tony’s hand. It’s oddly warm, and Steve finds himself examining the man’s calloused fingers after he lets go, his own fingers getting that sketchbook-itch once more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The second time Steve pulls up in front of Tony’s place, over a week has passed and Tony once again looks about as tired as Steve feels.

“Mrgh,” Tony says as he opens the door. “It would be weird if I crawled in your car and slept until we got to work, right?”

“Little bit.”

Tony climbs into the backseat and straps himself in. “Sadly, I’m keeping myself awake again tonight. If I fall asleep now, I’m gonna be conked out for at least eight hours.”

Steve cranes his neck to meet his eyes. He had been harboring the faint hope that Tony would take the front seat. “Want me to talk again?”

“Jabber away, loverboy.”

The way he says it makes it sound like a reference, but Steve has no idea what it could refer to. As he pulls away from the curb, he launches into a list of his teachers in chronological order. Like the last time, the content starts out with Steve dragging up whatever comes to mind, caring less about content and more about keeping the words flowing.

And like last time, it starts gaining momentum- Tony comments here and there and Steve replies, and it pinwheels sideways until they’ve lapsed into an actual conversation by the time Steve pulls up outside Tony’s workplace.

Tony squints up at it with an expression that Steve dutifully recognizes, as he feels the same expression morph his face every time he walks into his dishwashing job. It’s a look of dread, a look directed at something that was meant to be a stepping stone but is turning out to have a longer shelf life than they had hoped.

“Back in 15,” Tony tells him, and looks over. “Will you-”

“I’ll be here.”

“Feel free to nap.”

“Ha, ha.” Steve watches him get out before he turns to examine his hands on the steering wheel.

Absently, he rubs his fingers against the plastic of the wheel. The skin on his hands is dry and cracked from prolonged exposure to chemical-heavy dishwater and he’s been using skin cream sparingly, because even the bad stuff is more expensive than he’d like.

He startles when he hears his passenger door open and close. He looks beside him to see Tony slumping against the headrest.

“Ugh.”

“Something wrong? Did they not need you after all,” Steve asks. He cranes his neck to see the door to the building, where a man in a uniform is speaking into a radio, his eyes on Steve’s car.

“Security hasn’t cleared me yet. They’re calling people who will call some people, it’s all  _very important information_ , they can’t just let  _anybody_  in.” Tony scrubs a hand over his forehead. “It’s getting sorted out. Should take less than five minutes. I’d wait outside, but it’s cold. Is this-”

“It’s fine.” Steve thinks he notices the skin around Tony’s eyes relax, like he was anxious about Steve’s reaction. The idea makes Steve’s palms sweat, which definitely isn’t going to help his damaged skin, so he wipes them discreetly on his pants as he reaches for his glove box.

In it, there’s a still-warm thermos. He uncaps it and offers it to Tony. “Uh, want some soup? I was going to drink it if you had me wait again, but if you’re waiting too, you can have some. It’s pumpkin.”

After a beat, Tony says, “Well, if it’s  _pumpkin_ ,” and takes it from him, pouring a small amount into the lid. He wavers before taking a large sip. “Mm. Hearty. Thank you.”

He passes it back, and Steve takes it from him and turns the cup so he isn’t drinking from the spot Tony’s mouth had briefly touched before sipping the soup.

“Did you make it?”

Steve looks over. Tony is picking at his sleeves; he stops instantly once Steve’s eyes fall to track the movement.

Steve tears his eyes away and focuses on Tony’s face. “The soup? Nah, it’s from work. They had leftovers tonight and let me take some of it home.”

“That’s good of them,” Tony says. He glances sideways to where the guard is shifting on the spot, trying to keep warm. His radio is in his hand. Tony looks back to Steve and continues, “You don’t do this full time, then?”

Steve shakes his head. “I’m a dishwasher, during the day. Well-”

“-kitchenhand, right, sorry. Uber driver by night?”

“Pretty much.”

“When do you sleep?”

“I take a lot of power naps.” At Tony’s wide-eyed look, Steve smiles. “Hey, what about you? Mild-mannered techie during the day-”

“Mild mannered,” Tony mutters. His mouth twitches. “And  _techie_  is understating it hugely, believe me.”

“I believe you.” It sounds too earnest in the enclosed space, and Steve hears himself clear his throat. “Uh, would you like more soup?”

Tony holds his hand out and Steve passes him the thermos and lid.

“How’s dishwashing,” Tony asks after another large gulp of soup.

“It…” Steve has the phantom feel of endless plates in his hands, the thin sticks of utensils as he picks dried food out from between the tines of forks.

“It pays the bills,” Tony supplies when Steve doesn’t say more.

Steve snorts. “Mostly. Yeah.”

He bends his head to pour more soup, but he can feel Tony’s eyes on him. He takes his time drinking another lid’s worth of soup before saying, “What?”

“I bet you’re a very thorough dishwasher.”

“What?”

“Aren’t you?”

Steve thinks about it. “I guess. What about you?”

“Oh, I own a dishwasher. A mechanical one, not a person.”

“You know what I mean.”

Tony grins. Nothing is ever dark in New York, but for a second his smile drowns out the city lights that stream in from all sides.

“I’m the fucking best,” Tony says.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Steve opens the back door into the alley, Sam waves his phone at him.

“I was just texting you. How’ve you been, man?”

Steve gratefully accepts the hug Sam offers- it’s been a while since he’s had any kind of human contact that didn’t involve passing a dish, and Sam gives the best hugs, firm and tight with a squeeze at the end.

“Busy,” Steve says as he pulls back. “What about you, how’s post-grad going?”

Sam blows out a long breath. “It’s, uh. So much more expensive and about twice as hard! But I’m loving it when I’m not, y’know, having a crisis about my student debt and cursing my workload.”

Steve knows the feeling. He doesn’t exactly look back at those days with fondness- they were excruciating, at the time- but with a kind of affection he doesn’t look on his dayjob.

“We miss you over there,” Sam adds, squeezing Steve’s shoulder. “Kitchenhand gig the same as ever?”

“As always.”

Sam surveys him. Like Steve, he’s wearing the best he could find at a discount store, but unlike Steve, he wears it well. “Man, you look wrecked. And not the good kind of wrecked. Want me to guard the storeroom while you nap?”

“Nah, the manager told me I had to stop doing that. I was thinking we could get coffee, if you have the time.”

 _And the money_  is left unspoken.

Sam raises his eyebrows, looking Steve over, but doesn’t mention it. “Sure. I have almost an hour before I need to be back.”

Steve splurges and get whipped cream on his cappuccino, and is making his way through that when Sam asks, “Still Ubering?”

“Still Ubering,” Steve confirms. He pauses to suck cream off his straw. “You should register as a driver.”

“Only so many hours in the day, Steve.” Sam is watching him over his coffee the way they all used to watch each other during finals week: checking for warning signs. “Hey, how much sleep have you gotten in the last three days?”

Half to avoid the question and half so Steve doesn’t have to think about it, Steve struggles for anything to divert the conversation and comes up with, “I drew something for the first time in months the other day.”

That gets Sam perking up, though Steve expects that wasn’t the last he’s going to hear about his nonexistent sleep schedule. “Yeah? I told you you’d find time eventually.”

Steve makes a face. He had scribbled it in fits and bursts during a traffic jam.

“What’d you draw?”

Steve pauses. Dropping his eyes to the last of his whipped cream, he says, “Some guy I’ve been seeing around. Seeing  _around_ ,” Steve repeats when Sam’s face starts to do something worrying. “Come on, even if I did have time to date, I’m not the dating type. You know that.”

“Is he cute?”

Steve’s mouth moves wordlessly for a moment before he says, “So how are your roommates doing?”

“Can I see the drawing?”

“I don’t carry it around with me.”

“Aw, that’d be romantic.”

“It’d be creepy,” Steve corrects him. He licks away the last of his whipped cream and continues, “He’s an Uber customer.”

“Ahhh. Yeah, I’d be weirded out if my Uber drivers carried around sketches they drew of me. How many times have you had him.”

Steve says  _twice_  but mumbles it around the straw enough that Sam asks him to repeat it. On the second time around when Steve doesn’t mumble it as much, Sam says, “This guy spark your inspiration or is he just your type?”

 _Both_ , Steve doesn’t say. Instead he says, “It’s his hands, mostly. And his eyes. Don’t,” he warns when Sam adopts a shit-eating grin. “It’s artistic appreciation.”

“Artistic appreciation,” Sam repeats into his coffee mug before drinking it down.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Steve draws Tony a couple of more times after that: hasty scribbles on napkins and absent doodles on the pad he keeps on his bedside table. It’s mostly abstract, since Steve has only seen him a few times and only under streetlights.

The first time he catches a glimpse of Tony during daylight hours is two days after talking to Sam about him. The sky is starting to streak through with evening pink when Steve pulls up in front of Tony’s apartment complex.

“Hey,” Steve says as Tony slides into the backseat. He looks into the rear-view mirror in time to see Tony grinning.

“Howdy, stranger.”

It’s corny, but it gets Steve’s lips flexing into a smile. “You look less tired than usual.”

“Back at you.”

“So do you need me to, uh-”

“Probably not.” Tony says it lightly. “But if you’re up for it, I wouldn’t say no.”

Steve doesn’t even try to talk at Tony this time. Instead he opts for a conversation right out of the gate, since he guesses they’d lapse into it eventually anyway.

When he drops Tony back off at his place, Tony mentioned that his average has been going up on Uber.

Steve says “Great,” and tries to squash the knee-jerk panic that comes with the idea that other drivers might start picking up Tony’s requests before Steve can find them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Steve starts keeping an eye out. It’s only during what he quietly dubs as ‘peak Tony times,’ and it’s not obsessive amounts, but he checks his phone for Uber alerts more than he would before Tony came along.

He can hardly be the first to agree to pick Tony up every time, but he manages to be the first driver in the gate around a third of the time, which has him parking outside of Tony’s place about twice a week if he’s lucky.

He knows it’s pathetic, but driving Tony around is turning into the high points of his weeks. And Tony always grins whenever he sees Steve’s crappy van pull up to the curb, so Steve assumes his continued presence isn’t entirely unwelcome.

If Tony seemed anything less than enthused, Steve would stop looking out for his Uber alerts, but as it is- well, Tony seems just as happy to see Steve as Steve is to see him. From what Steve’s gleamed from their conversations, Tony only has one or two friends who he manages to see a couple of times a month, just like Steve. Even if Steve finds himself struggling to push down on the influx of not-quite-professional feelings towards his customer, he’s comfortable being someone Tony can vent to, someone Tony might even find an amount of solace in.

Still, Steve is permanently aware that he’s providing a service: he doesn’t try anything towards Tony, because even if he could dig up the confidence, he’s still the one with the power. The last thing he wants is to pull up to the curb and see Tony try to hide how uncomfortable he is.

So Steve keeps a careful distance right up until he’s driving back home after dropping Tony off and realizes that there’s a phone in his car that isn’t his.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Steve is in the middle of thanking god Tony lives in a small apartment complex when the door he’s knocking on flies open.

“Hi,” Steve says when he’s recovered from the sight of Tony with his shirt slightly unbuttoned, his hair sticking up like he’s been running his fingers through it all day. “Sorry, I just knocked on some doors until I found someone who knew which one you were in. Uh, you forgot-”

“Thank fuck,” Tony blurts, grabbing it out of Steve’s hands. “I thought I was going to have to find a phone booth to call- god, Uber offices or something. I don’t have a landline, who owns a landline nowadays-”

He stops, meeting Steve’s eyes. “I- thanks. This was- you didn’t have to.”

Steve shrugs, then forces shoulders down from where they try to stay hunched up near his ears. “It was no trouble.”

“Yeah? How many doors did you knock on before someone told you my number? I don’t know any of my neighbors.”

Steve shrugs again. “It didn’t take long, considering how many people live here. Only took…”

He thinks about it. “It took less than thirty doors,” he concludes.

Tony stares at him.

It doesn’t take long for Steve to start to squirm. “If you think about how many apartments there are in the whole place, it’s really not-”

“Do you want to come in?”

Steve’s tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth as his words fumble to a stop.

When Steve doesn’t respond, Tony’s eyes go shuttered, his face twisting. “Uh, no, yeah, bad idea. Sorry. It’s just, I have a lot of leftover Chinese food from last night, I had an old friend over and we got carried away trying things because he had a gift voucher so I thought-”

Steve realizes he’s losing hope of salvaging the situation and says, “I’d- I’d like to come in.”

It’s Tony’s turn to lose what he’s saying in mid-sentence. For a moment he just stares at Steve, but then he’s jolting backwards to give Steve space to step in.

“Thank you,” Steve tells him as Tony closes the door, because his mother didn’t raise a son with no manners and he’s clinging to anything that will give him something to say. He starts to continue with  _you have a nice place_ , but he gets distracted upon looking around and actually taking it in.

“Wow,” is what comes out instead.

Tony’s apartment is around as big as Steve’s, which is to say it could double as an expensive broom closet. From taking a few steps into the living room that opens into the hallway, Steve can see the kitchen, the door to the bathroom as well as he assumes is the bedroom.

But unlike Steve’s, there’s something hanging on every wall, clutter in every corner and surface. What look like blueprints are stuffed under multiple mugs on the kitchen counter. A Rube Goldberg machine takes over the rest of the counter with no purpose Steve can see.

There are equations scribbled on a cheap whiteboard that’s propped up on the couch and a laptop next to it that looks like it’s being held together with carefully-placed duct tape. Empty takeout cartons are stacked next to the TV-

“I know,” Tony says. Steve turns to see him surveying the place with almost nervous eyes. “Pepper tells me I’m going to get roaches.”

Steve privately agrees, but the things that make up the clutter- take away the roach bait and Steve is enthralled. He motions towards the Rube Goldberg machine. “What does that do?”

“Hmm?” Tony follows his gaze. “It turns on the expresso machine. I don’t know why I even made it, now I have to wait for it to work before the machine even starts.”

“You made it?”

“Yeah,” Tony says. His fingers flicker against his belt, tapping silently. “Can’t go too long without making something.”

“I know the feeling.”

Tony turns his gaze to Steve. “Right. You… draw? Paint? You went to art school, that I remember.”

“I do a bit of everything,” Steve says. “But now I mostly sketch. What about you? You said you were a technical security consultant, this doesn’t look like- uh, coding.”

“You have no idea what I do, do you.”

Steve shakes his head. “Whenever I think about it my mind immediately goes to hacker movies.”

Tony’s mouth twitches. “There’s coding involved.”

“But not this?” Steve nods towards the Rube Goldberg machine.

“No,” Tony says after a beat. “No, the inventing is- something else.”

Steve watches how Tony averts his gaze to the wall. There’s a story there, but before Steve can find a way to ask, Tony is looking back at him with a strained smile. “I promised you food.”

Steve follows him into the kitchen, mainly to admire the Rube Goldberg machine up close. He doesn’t touch it, afraid of poking something and having the whole thing fall apart, but he traces the skeleton of it with his eyes. It’s even more intricate up close, pieced together with obvious care and expertise.

“I cannibalized the toaster for parts,” Tony tells him as he slots two cartons of takeout into the microwave.

Steve doesn’t much know what to say to that- he doesn’t know what the inside of a toaster looks like, so he can’t exactly say  _ah_ ,  _yes, I see_. He doesn’t want to ask why Tony hasn’t brought a new one, since he knows the answer already and it’s all around them in the form of the tiny apartment.

In lieu of talking, he examines the Rube Goldberg machine further. What’s inside a toaster, anyway? Metal and mechanisms, if he’s going by the machine in front of him.

He can hear the microwave humming behind him as he searches for something to say to Tony. Ask what takeout they’re eating, maybe. Ask after his friends, Pepper and- Rhodes? Rhodey, who both work copious hours and don’t get to see each other or Tony much.

Steve turns around, lips parting in order to ask a question that Steve will hopefully have invented by the time he starts talking, but any question he might’ve asked dies in his throat when he registers how close Tony is standing.

“Uh,” is what Steve says instead. It’s more a breath than an actual word. Tony is looking up at him with those big, dark eyes and a near-puzzled expression, like Steve is one of those machines and Tony can’t figure out the pieces that make him work. His eyes are half-lidded in a way that Steve has had directed at him exactly once.

Steve feels the proximity all the way up his spine, because Steve hasn’t been kissed in years and he hasn’t had feelings for anyone in just as long, and these things don’t happen to him. He doesn’t get invited into the apartments by gorgeous men who Steve doesn’t know but wants to more than anything, and he sure as hell doesn’t get kissed by them.

Steve realizes he should probably do something that doesn’t involve standing shock-still with his arms at his sides, and maybe he should close his eyes while he’s at it.

As he’s leaning in, processing what exactly he should do with his hands as well as the rest of his body, the microwave dings.

It’s enormously loud in the tiny kitchen, and it startles Steve into opening his eyes.

What he sees has his stomach clenching- Tony’s eyes have gone from half-lidded to wide open, and he’s stiff and leaning slightly away from Steve, like his feet are rooted to the spot but he’s still making an effort to put space between them.

Mortification crashes over Steve in a wave. He pulls back fast enough that he nearly bangs into the counter behind him. “God- Tony, I’m so sorry-”

“No, it’s-” Tony starts talking over him, but their apologies overlap until Tony says, “It’s  _fine_ ,” loud enough to stop Steve in his tracks.

Tony winces. “Shit.”

“I should go.”

To his surprise, Tony grabs his arm. “Hey, no-”

“I shouldn’t have assumed,” Steve tries, but Tony waves him down with the hand that isn’t on Steve’s elbow.

“No, you had- you got the right idea.” He sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose hard enough that the skin around his fingers whitens. “I’m not good at this when it’s… real. When there could be something real.”

Steve waits for Tony to elaborate, but all that happens is Tony lets go of Steve to stick his hands in his own pockets.

“I’d like to get to know you,” Tony says. “You know- when I’m not paying you to drive me around the city.”

Steve blinks at him. “I can drive other people.”

“Yeah?”

“If that’s what it takes for you to ask me out, sure,” Steve says, and instantly regrets it. “I mean- would you be-?” He gestures between them to indicate the Not-Kissing that had just occurred. “I’m just not sure where we’re at,” he finishes.

Tony winces again. He reaches up to rub a hand through the back of his hair, then his face twists further. He brings his hand out so he can look at it. “Fuck, is that coffee? Is there coffee in my hair?”

Steve examines his palm. “Looks like it.”

“Fuck,” Tony says again, wiping it on his shirt. “I’m so glad this is where we’re having this conversation, by the way. I’ve never looked so appealing.”

“I’ve drawn you when you looked worse.”

Tony pauses in cleaning his fingers on his shirt. “You’ve drawn me?”

“Maybe once or twice.”

Tony’s fingers flex unconsciously in his shirt. Steve watches them and thinks back to the pages he has of Tony’s hands.

Steve sucks in a breath, lets it out quietly. “So, to clear this up- you  _are_  asking me out?”

“Yes,” Tony says immediately.

Steve nods. “Okay. I don’t- I don’t tend to date much, but-”

He stops himself from saying  _for you, I’ll give it a try_. Instead he says, “Okay,” again.

Tony smiles. It’s fleeting, there and gone like he isn’t sure what to do with it once it blooms on his face. Then he’s leaning in- hesitating just enough for Steve to give a miniscule nod- pressing their mouths together.

Steve thinks it’s meant to be a continuation of Tony’s apology for filching out on the kiss earlier, but somewhere in the middle of this kiss it turns deeper. Tony’s hands find Steve’s hair and tangle through it.

Steve lets himself get lost in it for a while before exhaustion starts tugging at his bones. He pulls back reluctantly. “Not that this isn’t nice, but I’m really tired. It’s-” He checks his watch. “2 am.”

“Oh god, same.” Tony’s fingers skim the back of Steve’s neck. Steve can feel him ghosting his nails over the end of his hairline. “Shelve the takeout for another time?”

Steve considers this. “Or we could eat it in front of bad infomercials and fall asleep on the couch.”

Tony gives Steve a look and Steve thinks about taking it back- he’s never been the most exciting guy in the world, he knows that, but-

“Sounds good,” Tony says, and Steve can’t find any kind of insincerity in Tony’s voice.

 

 

 

 

 

Tony falls asleep before he does, around about the time Steve is regretting their decision to fall asleep on the couch. They’re going to wake up cursing their joints tomorrow.

Still, Steve can’t bring himself to wake Tony up to suggest they move anywhere else. The takeout sits mostly-empty along with the rest of the boxes, Tony snores quietly into Steve’s chest, and Steve feels a haze of contentment settle over him as sleep drags him under.

**Author's Note:**

> This is something I wrote a few years ago, I'm posting it on a03 for a friend. Enjoy!
> 
> here's my [tumblr](http://theappleppielifestyle.tumblr.com/).


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